Artificial intelligence: a new synthesis
Artificial intelligence: a new synthesis
Reference architecture for holonic manufacturing systems: PROSA
Computers in Industry - Special issue on manufacturing systems
Collaboration rules for autonomous software agents
Decision Support Systems - Special issue on restructuring the electric power business—a new paradigm for reducing regulation
Multi-Agent Systems: An Introduction to Distributed Artificial Intelligence
Multi-Agent Systems: An Introduction to Distributed Artificial Intelligence
Trends in Cooperative Distributed Problem Solving
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
On cooperation in multi-agent systems
The Knowledge Engineering Review
The Contract Net Protocol: High-Level Communication and Control in a Distributed Problem Solver
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Holarchy formation and optimization in holonic manufacturing systems with contract net
Automatica (Journal of IFAC)
Fault-tolerant deadlock avoidance algorithm for assembly processes
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans
Model and control holonic manufacturing systems based on fusion of contract nets and Petri nets
Automatica (Journal of IFAC)
Analysis of contract net in multi-agent systems
Automatica (Journal of IFAC)
Brief paper: Collaborative reconfiguration mechanism for holonic manufacturing systems
Automatica (Journal of IFAC)
Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal
Collaborative composition of processes in holonic manufacturing systems
Computers in Industry
Context-aware workflow management based on formal knowledge representation models
ICCCI'10 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Computational collective intelligence: technologies and applications - Volume Part II
COMAS: a cooperative multiagent architecture for spectrum sharing
EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking
Collaborative workflow management in holonic multi-agent systems
KES-AMSTA'11 Proceedings of the 5th KES international conference on Agent and multi-agent systems: technologies and applications
Pheromone-based coordination for manufacturing system control
Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing
How to learn from the resilience of Human-Machine Systems?
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal
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Although the contract net protocol answers some of the questions in cooperative distributed problem solving (CDPS), it raises many others that CDPS researchers are still trying to answer. In contract net protocol, an agent may play the role of a manager or a bidder. Without a coordination mechanism, a manager may acquire excessive resources from the bidders in forming a collaborative network to execute the assigned task and thus hinder the progress of the tasks assigned to other managers due to resource contention. As a result, application of contract net protocol may not always lead to feasible solutions to accomplish tasks effectively. As a general framework for exchanging messages, the original contract net protocol does not prescribe how agents should cooperate. How to develop a collaborative mechanism to effectively perform the tasks is an important issue. This paper aims to improve the insufficiency of the contract net by developing a mechanism to facilitate cooperation of agents to accomplish their tasks while avoiding undesirable states and enhance the overall system performance in manufacturing systems. To achieve these objectives, detail process models about how agents accomplish their tasks are required. Due to the advantages in modeling concurrent, synchronous and/or asynchronous activities, Petri nets are adopted in this paper. Based on Petri net models, we study the information needed for agents to make cooperative decisions, mechanism to make agents cooperate, and how to enhance the performance in the system level by taking advantage of the agents' cooperation capabilities. To characterize the condition for cooperation, we represent the collaborative networks formed based on the contract net protocol with Petri nets and then find the condition for a collaborative network to be feasible. The feasible condition also serves as a condition for the development of cooperation mechanism for managers. We propose a cooperation mechanism based on the idea of resource donation, including unilateral resource donation and reciprocal resource donation. Implementation architecture has also been proposed to realize our methodology.